You Should Be Writing By Hand. - by Laurie Penny

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You Should Be Writing By Hand.<br>This is why.

Laurie Penny<br>Jul 31, 2026

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This is about a quarter of my stash of filled notebooks. One of them is probably a mimic.<br>It has come to my attention that you might not be carrying a notebook with you at all times. You should. Unless some sort of physical or developmental disability prevents it, all writers should write by hand - especially now, because only human writers do, and that matters.<br>I write on paper. Always have. All of my journals, my first drafts, my pitches and story structures and odd notions and late-night brain excursions, everything I want to remember or understand. I take a notebook with me almost everywhere I go. I thought all writers did. Someone, after all, must be keeping those natty little Moleskine stores in business. Someone, I assumed, must be using them.<br>Apparently I was wrong about that. A few months ago, not long ago I went to a panel about the future of publishing at the London Book fair, which turned out, of course, a room full of terrified writers wondering if there would be snacks. I got out my notebook out to start jotting things down, as is my habit during talks, at work, on the train, in front of the tv, on zoom calls, on phone calls, in the bathroom, when I’m sad, when I’m angry, when something amazing happens, when I can’t work out what I’m feeling, when I want something I can’t have, when I need to pay attention, when I need to look like I’m paying attention - you get the idea. My friend, one of my top five favourite burned-out geniuses in town, leaned over and said - get you, with your notebook! There’s a proper writer.<br>At first, I thought he might be taking the piss. I looked around and, sure enough, nobody else had a notebook out. Not one other person, in an entire roomful of writers who were not required to do anything but sit in silence and contemplate the impending collapse of whatever shoddy security we had managed to build. For what it’s worth, I built mine on the back of boxes of notebooks which are, by now, a significant proportion of what I own by weight and volume.<br>My notebooks are the one thing I’ve kept, consistently, for almost twenty five years. I started carrying one around when I was about thirteen, when I played Anne Frank in a school play. The major prop, obviously, was notebook in red check cloth, and it couldn’t be obviously blank and figured I might as well start using it because. While my pre-pubescent life was different from Anne Frank’s in several crucial ways, I liked the idea of having a secret, special friend who would always listen.<br>I tried out keeping a normal diary, like I was writing fully-formed thoughts to a far-away friend, but that didn’t last. I couldn’t pretend I was writing to anyone other than myself - but I didn’t have to pretend, and that was the real magic. Taking notes helped me concentrate in class. It helped me focus when everything felt chaotic. When I got sick with eating disorders in my late teens, it was writing by hand in my notebooks- endless stacks of them- that helped me recover. I remember feeling frantic to scratch my way out of the carapace I’d built around my future, to write myself back into being, and it worked. I still have those notebooks. One day, I’ll take the plunge and reread them.<br>I’m not precious about my notebooks. I’m fussy about them, but in very private and unexpected ways that work for me. They’re are not organised, or tidy, or in any particular order. I often keep a to-do list at the back, and I rarely start writing at the front. They’re incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t me, and most of them are booby-trapped with erotica, which is of course another way of saying porn that works for me. You might also find snippets of dialogue, workout routines lists of pitches, loglines, something clever a friend said in the car, and lots of biro drawings of eyes. Sometimes of strange elf-women, but mostly eyes.<br>When I look through my old notebooks, they look back.<br>It’s disconcerting.<br>Anyway. Writing by hand is an important discipline for almost every writer. Here’s why.<br>It cannot be pinched or copied or fed to a slavering algorithm to suck up the smallest squeeze of potential profit for whoever happens to be buying and selling your data at this time. It’s private. That means iThe only way to snoop, steal or otherwise exploit what I write in my notebooks is to physically rob me. Admittedly, I’m fairly distractible and easy to rob, but you’d have to put in at least a little effort, and then you’d have to decipher my handwriting. And most of my notebooks are booby-trapped with scraps of really weird erotica. Go ahead, make my day.

It’s not connected to the flashing dopamine casino - your emails, your calendar, the firehose of doom pumping out of the daily news, a hundred sources of cheap and immediate distraction, every possible game you might ever play and your entire social...